Two worlds divided

Chapter 7

She had sent it; the email had been sent off once the poll results came in, consulting the staff face to face would have caused her more stress than she wanted so it was a mass email. Then she had emailed the lucky candidate being offered the job; Miranda had won the majority of students' votes, while the staff vote had remained even.

She was sitting in her office with a wine glass in hand on Friday night; she had her tablet open on the results page, the only source of light in her office with the curtains drawn closed. This was her third glass as she looked at the overwhelming seventy-eight percent majority vote, she would have to help Miranda adjust next week; help her move in, help her get set up with a profile picture, and log in. Everything she had done for the others she would have to do for the human; equality was their new thing after all.

Thankfully the next three weeks would give her a chance to get used to the flow within the school before being thrown into lessons. Next week was mock exam week with students being off timetable and out of lessons; with the expectation that when they were not taking exams they were revising, and the following two weeks were winter break. That was one human custom Selena liked, she would hate having to teach during the coldest weeks of December.

She could sit in her office with a warm drink under a blanket and watch the stars either alone or with Nyx, she could ignore the pain in her leg, she could ignore her electronics, she could ignore her students and her faculty; she could simply just be a normal creature again. She could ignore all the responsibilities she had put upon herself when she first opened the school; the ones that seemed to just continue to grow.

Selena had been the first creature to fully come out of hiding, to build a home for herself where humans were able to actually find her if they wanted to hunt her down, but that was because she had needed food, convincing them that they had a chance to chase her away had brought idiotic men to her home, and no idiotic man had left. She felt guilty about Mathew, of course she did, he didn't deserve to be reanimated, but she had not been at fault for that, he was the one who kept wanting to live and the universe listened.

Even she was not sure what made a human become a creature; it was an intricate process that very few had experienced and even fewer had seen. She had not seen his transformation, she was out of her home on a hunt, but when she returned to find a moving corpse she knew what had happened, even if it was practically folklore at that point in creature history.

Mathew had been her first student, she had taught him everything in her library and had helped him get used to his new body. She had taught him everything from myth to legend and back again, she had made sure that whatever creature she had created would never feel alone in the world, she knew how it felt to be hunted by humans; she had experienced it firsthand after all.

Opening the school had taught her that torturing humans perhaps was not the best thing; that maybe just killing them like they were attempting to do to her was better, but she was a young and resentment-filled creature back then. It was the only time she would ever call herself a monster, even if she hated the term, it was the only way to describe her actions. Selena had tried to cover up her past; she had hidden old diaries, buried old pictures, converted her beloved dungeon to her wine cellar, she had tried anything and everything to bury her past.

Then that idiotic woman had shown up, all smiles and chuckles, acting as if she actually cared about the wellbeing of creatures, her students. Something was strange about that woman, something very strange, but as Selena took another swig of wine she forgot all about her and instead focussed on the night sky in front of her, focussed on her favourite constellation, the one that was always visible from her window, especially with the moon as full as it was now. Thankfully, the human myths of werewolves were false, they were always in wolf form, and the full moon simply made them act like large puppies, she was grateful she wouldn't have staff and students transforming tonight.